In the year 469, the Roman Catholic Church made a pact with Clovis I, King of the Franks, bestowing upon him the title "New Constantine", in exchange for his conversion to the faith.

Thus began the Holy Roman Empire, with the promise that the title would be passed down to his descendants from that moment on. In the year 800, that promise was broken.

Dagobert II was a French king from the sacred Merovingian bloodline, the last Merovingian to hold the title "Holy Roman Emperor".

The Merovingians were a dynasty of Frankish priest-kings who were believed by their subjects to have magical powers derived from their long red hair.

among others.

In fact, portraits of Merovingian kings customarily depict them holding one of these crystal balls in the left hand.

Since the time of Clovis I, the Merovingians had presided over the Holy Roman Empire, but by the time Dagobert II was born, the power of the throne had already been weakened, with authority increasingly being usurped by court chancellors known as "Mayors of the Palace".

 

On the death of his father, the 5-year-old Dagobert was kidnapped by then Palace Mayor Grimoald, who tried to put his own son on the throne.

Human compassion saved him from death, and he was exiled to Ireland, only to return years later and reclaim the throne in 679.

But the problems of the Mayors of the Palace continued.

Three years later, apparently displeased with Dagobert’s lack of allegiance, the Roman church entered into a conspiracy with Mayor Pepin the Fat.

On December 23, while on a hunting trip, Dagobert was lanced through the eye by his own godson, supposedly on Pepin’s orders.

With Roman endorsement, Pepin passed political power onto his son, Charles Martel, thus starting the Carolingian dynasty that would later become so famous.

Charles Martel (/mɑːrˈtɛl/; c. 688 – 22 October 741), Martel being a sobriquet in Old French for "The Hammer", was a Frankish political and military leader who, as Duke and Prince of the Franks and Mayor of the Palace, was the de facto ruler of the Franks from 718 until his death. He was a son of the Frankish statesman Pepin of Herstal and a noblewoman named Alpaida. Charles successfully asserted his claims to power as successor to his father as the power behind the throne in Frankish politics. Continuing and building on his father's work, he restored centralized government in Francia and began the series of military campaigns that re-established the Franks as the undisputed masters of all Gaul. According to a near-contemporary source, the Liber Historiae Francorum, Charles was "a warrior who was uncommonly ... effective in battle".  Charles gained a very consequential victory against an Umayyad invasion of Aquitaine at the Battle of Tours, at a time when the Umayyad Caliphate controlled most of the Iberian Peninsula. Alongside his military endeavours, Charles has been traditionally credited with an influential role in the development of the Frankish system of feudalism.  At the end of his reign, Charles divided Francia between his sons, Carloman and Pepin. The latter became the first king of the Carolingian dynasty. Pepin's son Charlemagne, grandson of Charles, extended the Frankish realms and became the first emperor in the West since the Fall of the Western Roman Empire.

After that, the Merovingian bloodline faded into obscurity.

Merovingian Bloodline: The Lost Kings – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)

 

All subsequent Merovingian kings were essentially powerless, and they were officially thought to have died out with Dagobert’s grandson, Childeric III.

Childeric III (c. 717 – c. 754) was King of the Franks from 743 until he was deposed in 751 by Pepin the Short. He was the last Frankish king from the Merovingian dynasty. Once Childeric was deposed, Pepin became king, initiating the Carolingian dynasty.

49 years later, Charles Martel’s grandson, Charlemagne was anointed Holy Roman Emperor.

The church had finally washed its hands of the Merovingian problem, or so they thought.

And what was the problem, exactly?

Well, rumor has it that the Merovingian bloodline was descendant from Jesus, or one of his brothers, who fled Roman persecution at the time of the crucifixion and escaped to France, where they intermarried with French royalty.

This claim is made by certain members of modern European nobility, who trace their own ancestry back to Dagobert’s son Sigebert IV.

According to this claim, the Merovingians knew the truth about Jesus and his actual significance as King of the Jews.

 

They knew the Roman church had stolen their birthright - Jerusalem, co-opted the idea of Jesus and created a fictionalized version of the Messiah to further their own agenda - world domination, both secular and spiritual.

The Merovingians knew that the fantasy of Christ as a virgin-born deity who suffered willingly for our sins and ascended to heaven was just that - an "opiate of the masses" used by the Romans as an excuse to set themselves up as the arbiters of God in order to perpetuate their faltering empire.

This might have been the whole reason for the pact with Clovis I, to effectively shut him and his family up.

Clovis (Latin: Chlodovechus; reconstructed Frankish: *Hlōdowig; c. 466 – 27 November 511) was the first king of the Franks to unite all of the Franks under one ruler, changing the form of leadership from a group of petty kings to rule by a single king, and ensuring that the kingship was passed down to his heirs. He is considered to have been the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, which ruled the Frankish kingdom for the next two centuries. Clovis is important in the historiography of France as "the first king of what would become France." Clovis succeeded his father, Childeric I, as a king of the Salian Franks in 481, and eventually came to rule an area extending from what is now the southern Netherlands to northern France, corresponding in Roman terms to Gallia Belgica (northern Gaul). At the Battle of Soissons (486), he established his military dominance of the rump state of the fragmenting Western Roman Empire, which was then under the command of Syagrius. By the time of his death in 511, Clovis had conquered several smaller Frankish kingdoms in the northeast of Gaul, stretching into what is now Germany. Clovis also conquered the Alemanni in eastern Gaul and the Visigothic kingdom of Aquitania in the southwest. These campaigns added significantly to Clovis's domains and established his dynasty as a major political and military presence in western Europe.  Clovis is also significant because of his baptism in 508, largely at the behest of his wife, Clotilde, who would later be venerated as a saint for this act, celebrated today in both the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church. The adoption by Clovis of Catholicism (as opposed to the Arianism of most other Germanic tribes) led to widespread conversion among the Franks, and eventually to religious unification across what is now modern-day France, the Low Countries and Germany. The alliance between the Franks and Catholicism eventually led to Charlemagne's crowning by the Pope as emperor in 800, and to the subsequent birth of the early Holy Roman Empire in the middle of the 10th century.

And with the death of Dagobert II, they thought they had eradicated this threat for good.

They were sorely mistaken.

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Who Was Dagobert II?

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Who Was Dagobert II? – Library of Rick and RIA (RARE Information Access)